Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  A recollection comes to mind, of teaching “Clay” to undergraduates many years ago. In the class was a young woman from one of the Caribbean islands, who was shy and spoke with a musical lilt. The world in which she grew up and that of late-nineteenth-century Irish James Joyce seemingly could not have been farther apart. And as far as I could tell from her classwork, she had very little practice analyzing a work of literature. But she raised her hand. “This line on page one,” she said. “About Maria slicing the barmbrack bread so finely and evenly that one could not see the places where the knife had cut—isn’t that what Joyce does in creating the character of Maria? You can’t see the cuts?”

  So often had I taught “Clay” that under hypnosis I could probably recite it from memory. But never had I heard anyone say what that young woman said. “Do you know,” I told her, “you’ve probably noticed something about this story that’s not only right, but has never been noticed before?” She smiled. The class smiled. I smiled.

  “Some of you will teach as well as write. Moments like that one are why you’ll do it.”

  Sven asks, “If beginnings of stories are supposed to grab you, are they like journalism?”

  I grimace. Those who know me also know that I hate the intrusion of journalism when we’re talking about real writing. But, “Yes,” I answer. “Newspaper stories and fiction are alike in that—seeking your attention immediately. So are plays, especially one-acters. Something about the characters or the setting has to attract you right away.”

  “And poems too,” says Suzanne.

  “Absolutely. Whether the poem is the long form—‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of That Forbidden Tree . . .’ or ‘Go and catch a falling star.’ Who wrote that line, Jasmine? I forget.” She will not deign to answer.

  Funny about beginnings. They seem arbitrary—pick any point at which to begin—yet they often contain everything in the piece, in truncated form. This is true of other arts, as well. Of music. The overture to The Magic Flute, complicated as it is, compresses every element of the entire opera. Of course, the artist may create this compression only after he has finished the work, realized what it’s about, and then made an adjustment back at the beginning. I suspect Fitzgerald did that with Gatsby. I think he figured out Jay Gatsby as he went along, then rewrote the beginning, when Nick warns us against easy judgments, to make everything fit. But just as often, we sense that somehow the writer knows where he or she is going, even if the full meaning of the story has not yet revealed itself. And the beginning contains all that, hidden in code, like a cipher. In Their Eyes Were Watching God I’m pretty sure Zora Neale Hurston knew what she was doing from the start. Her beginning—about the different ways men and women see reality—claims her theme.

  “Do you want us to read more than the first sentence of ‘Clay’?” asks Diana.

  I ignore the chuckles. “Good idea. Read all of ‘Clay’ for next week. And get ahold of Salinger’s ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ and ‘The Laughing Man.’ We’ll talk about them, too. But for the moment, let’s stay with beginnings. What is a beginning?”

  “A very good way to start,” said Kristie.

  “That it is. But there are lots of good ways to start. Think of your story as a house with a thousand doors. You may enter your house from any one of its doors, but only one door is right for your story. How do you know?”

  “Does it have to do with who tells the story?” asks Donna.

  “You tell me.”

  “Well,” she says, “I suppose that’s what’s meant by point of view.”

  “And why choose one point of view over another?”

  “Because,” says Jasmine, “that determines what you want your story to mean.”

  “Good. When Hamlet tells Hamlet, it means one thing. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell the play, it means something else. Same thing happens when the witch tells Wicked.”

  “Beginnings are impossible for me,” says Kristie. “Even when you know who is to tell your story, it’s hard to know where to begin.”

  “Where to begin?” says Nina. “People say that when they’re scrounging around for a starting point.”

  “And they do that, because a starting point, of anything, is subjective. At best, it’s the place where you think the story will unfold most completely and with greatest impact.”

  I poke about in my canvas book bag, and come up with a quotation from Daniel Deronda. It is one of a dozen such quotations I carry around, like a homeless man’s furnishings.

  “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” wrote George Eliot. “Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Naught. . . . No retrospect will take us to the true beginning and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.”

  “What is especially wonderful about Eliot’s observation is what she says about the scientist, supposedly the least poetic of writers. Even he must guess at the moment between the tick and the tock when time is nothing and the story of the universe can get under way. The beginning of a piece will often arrive on its own, unbidden. It will tilt at you, like a plant in the wind.”

  I forage for another quotation, from Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

  “This is starting to sound mystical,” says Sven, to whom the mystical does not seem to appeal.

  “I know. Because often the beginning must just come to you. And I can’t explain it, but it does.”

  We speak of the odd selectivity of the writer, and how it is tied to the imagination. Why do some things catch your eye, and some things don’t? You notice a fragment of red wool caught on a hedge. Did the fragment merely drift there, or did it snag on the hedge, part of a sweater belonging to a girl who was walking by? Or was she making love with her boyfriend, the gardener’s son? Or was she raped by a gang of bikers who held her against that hedge, and the red fabric was left to tell of the crime? Or did the piece of wool drop from the sky after an airplane explosion? Whatever its story, the redness stands out against the green hedge, which is natural and permanent, in splendid desolation. The remnant is human, temporary. It may blow away, but not yet, not before you notice it.

  “You may be affected by your mood, too. Sometimes you’re receptive to your imagination, sometimes you shut it out. Your phone rings. When you answer, the person on the other end hangs up. If you are not feeling writerly, you dismiss the incident as a wrong number. If you are feeling writerly, the person at the other end of the phone was your high school sweetheart who has longed for the sound of your voice all these years, or a burglar waiting for you to leave the house, or your friend who has a bone to pick with you, but thinks the better of it.”

  “Or a telemarketer,” says Donna, “who just can’t bring herself to do her job anymore, and whose conscience doesn’t allow her to bother one more person—”

  “And she runs from her office in the bank—,” says Inur.

  “In India,” says Robert.

  “And flees to Long Island,” says Jasmine, “where she marries—”

  “George!” says Suzanne. Her husband buries his head in his hands.

  “Even the greatest of our writers can get off to a false start.” I tell them about a public conversation with Edgar Doctorow at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Edgar told the audience he had written 150 pages of The Book of Daniel before he’d realized he had chosen the wrong way to tell the story. He’d written it in the third person, the so-called omniscient point of view. But The Book of Daniel is about innocence and its apprehension of injustice. It required the innocent voice, Daniel’s. So
one morning Edgar tossed out the 150 pages and started all over, letting the boy Daniel tell the story. I also wanted the class to understand that Edgar was happy to start from scratch, because he had picked the wrong door the first time.

  “And how did he know which door was the right door? Because he remembered—”

  “What the story was about,” drone three or four.

  “Did he really throw out all those pages?” asks Robert. The class looks dismayed.

  “You think that’s hard to do? You’d be surprised. When you know something doesn’t work, and you chuck it, the feeling is pure liberation, nearly as good as doing something right in the first place. Actually, the feeling is better because the elimination of the wrong choice fortifies the rightness of the right one. Never wed yourself to a piece till it’s finished and you’re satisfied that all the parts work together. Often the section you prize the most, the one you’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with, turns out to be expendable. Toss it. What you thought was married bliss was really a one-night stand. You’ll be deliriously happy to discover how thrilling it feels to get rid of something that does not fit your story—just like life.”

  “Can you hedge your bets,” Diana asks, “and file away the thrown-out parts for use in another piece of work?”

  “Writers do that all the time. But I tell you, in my experience, we’re just fooling ourselves. Whenever I try to wedge my discarded beauty into another piece, the transplant fails. The unworkable withers in the desk drawer. We’re always better off starting fresh.”

  “I’m amazed to learn that E. L. Doctorow ever had to clear his throat,” says George.

  “Happens to the best of us. And once you do it, you’ll be surprised how fast you move. Good writers always know when something is wrong with a piece. They may kid themselves for a while, but the mistake eats at them until they have no choice but to act. They may not know what exactly is wrong, but it bothers them to death. It rattles the dishes at night, and bangs the shutters. And when they finally correct it, when they write that perfectly clear, just right sentence, they’re off. They hurtle down the slope.”

  “Should we use an outline?” says Donna.

  “Never. The trouble with using an outline is that you’ll follow it.” They titter. “I’m not joking. You’ll cover everything you’ve put down in one portion of your outline, all the while aiming for what you’ve put in the following portion. All you’ll be doing is reading a road map. You’ll never surprise yourself with a sudden turn.”

  “I’m confused,” says Diana. “Are we on a road or a ski slope?”

  “When class is over, Diana, remind me to kill you.”

  “But won’t an outline keep you orderly, so that you’re clear to the reader?” asks Jasmine.

  “Don’t worry about the reader. Worry about the story. Your story will determine its own orderliness without your planning it out step by step.”

  “I have trouble figuring out what jobs to give my characters,” says Nina.

  “Because it’s the last thing we think of. When creating a character, we usually start with the soul and then work outward from there. But it’s a lot smarter to start with what the guy does for a living. There’s a reason McTeague was a dentist. In Ann Petry’s Country Place, the town stud runs the filling station.”

  “You said that we know what has happened in a short story before it begins,” says Ana. “Then how do we know where to begin our story?”

  “It grows out of the understanding of your characters you’ve already developed. You begin your story knowing everything about your people except what is going to happen to them.”

  When they read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” they will see that it begins one afternoon, when something is about to happen to the despairing Seymour Glass. But they will also see that this beginning comes at a moment of impasse. It is the beginning of an inevitable end. After reading a novel, we often wonder what happens to the characters after the final page. We can imagine Pip’s future, or Mrs. Verlock’s, or Count Vronsky’s. That rarely happens with short stories. In a way, they begin with an announcement of the end. After the last page of a short story, there is no more Seymour Glass, and no more Maria either.

  “So in effect you begin a short story by saying, ‘We’ve come to this,’ ” says Ana.

  “I wish I had said that.”

  “You will,” says Kristie.

  “I have a very hard time figuring out what to write,” says Jasmine.

  “Some days I simply cannot write,” says Inur. “I can spend weeks clearing my throat.”

  “You ought to write every day if you can, even if it’s a single sentence. But you can’t force it. And you can’t force subject matter. On the other hand, you can be proactive and find ways to allow your mind to be receptive to whatever may come its way.” I tell them about Friedrich Schiller, who used to fill a dresser drawer with rotten apples, and begin his writing day by breathing in the fumes.

  “Mrs. Schiller must have loved that,” says Suzanne.

  “The trick for a lot of writers is to create a state of mind where you are not thinking about writing. Rather create a state of reverie, a dream state. Dreams are where other people escape from reality. But for the writer, dreams are reality.”

  “What do you do to achieve that dream state?” Sven asks.

  “Take a walk. That’s what Dante and Nietzsche did—they wrote on long walks. Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, dictated his poems to his secretary at the Hartford Insurance Company, where he worked.”

  “Do you use any rituals,” Kristie asks me, “when you prepare to write?”

  “Nothing elaborate. I start the morning with coffee, toast, and orange juice. Then usually, a bowl of Special K, with slices of banana or not. Finally, a shot of heroin, and I’m off.”

  “What if we’re out of heroin?” asks Diana.

  “Paddle about in a kayak. Ride a bike. Create a situation in which you look outside yourself. Something inside yourself will come to you.”

  “I find that’s true,” says Robert. “But the something that comes to me is freakish.”

  I agree with him. “But you may find that what started out as freakish eventually shows itself to be part of something universal. That often comes later in the piece, after you’ve started writing.” It all comes down to that difference between invention and imagination. John Irving is a master of invention, but very little in his work displays a larger imagination. Imagination ties the freakish, as Robert calls it, to the eternal. “As writers you have to remind yourself that people are always strange. They don’t need to have three nipples, or four ears, or be able to swallow the ocean in one gulp to be strange. And the great moment in writing something is when you realize that the wonderful, unheard-of event you just made up is part of the wonderful, heard-of event of life itself.”

  “So what’s the purpose of writing?” Donna asks. “To discover what is permanently beautiful?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes writing shows us what is beautiful, sometimes what is evil, sometimes what is ugly or petty or stupid. Writing is at heart a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold said. And you can only criticize life effectively by using something recognizably within life, not something so way-out that it flies off the earth and never returns.”

  Suzanne looks skeptical. “Do you really believe in that mysterious receptive state you referred to?” she asks. “Most of the fiction I’ve read comes off as perfectly planned and worked out.”

  “Does it not? Not only that, it charts the sequence of things, how the events follow logically. So it all seems very neat. But it isn’t neat. The orderly, sequential story you read probably came out of an initially mysterious moment, and a trance. And to your point, Suzanne, the final product probably wound up looking nothing like what the author originally envisioned. Some writers talk about their fiction getting away from them—how their characters take on lives of their own and go their own ways, as if rebelling against the author. That actually happ
ens in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. It sounds wild, even nightmarish, but all the rebellion of characters really means is that a writer’s vision changes as he gets deeper into the work. One of the things you’ll find about this odd pursuit of ours is that you begin to trust change. Writing keeps you liberal. It shakes up your ideas about everything. Half the fiction we love, maybe more, looks nothing like the pictures their authors started out with.”

  “So that original, mystical inspiration is misleading?” Robert asks.

  “No, Robert. It actually shows itself to be more mysterious than you thought. What you understand of it at the outset is simply different from what you understand of it in the end.”

  The windows frame a light snowfall. I look at it a moment, pause for effect, then burst into song: “Happy Birthday to You.” They give me the he’s-gone-nuts look I’ve come to cherish over the years. I sing it again. “Happy Birthday to You. Anyone had a birthday recently? Anyone about to have one?” Two or three raise their hands. I choose Sven. “Let’s all sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Sven.” He looks less pleased than confused.

  “Now here’s what I’d like you to do for your short story. Hear the song ‘Happy Birthday’ in your minds, and start to write. Don’t worry if, when you’re alone, the story doesn’t pan out. For the present, just sit back and see what comes of listening to this irritating, celebratory song you’ve heard all your lives.” I sing it again. “Now write.”

  I watch them lean back for a minute or two, then lean forward, and go at it. The classroom is still, save for the motion of their hands on paper. This is how we begin.

  Chapter 3

  My Story, My Self

  That year I taught at the Kennedy School yielded the most unusual student I ever taught, the hardest nut to crack, and, in the end, one of the most rewarding. Anurada came to the essay-writing class after a tour in the Marines in Iraq, where she served as the lone woman in a hand-to-hand combat unit. She stood about five-four, and weighed no more than 110 pounds. And except for the standard-issue student outfit of a T-shirt and jeans, she looked quite feminine, with a touch of the tomboy. When she was seeking a subject for her essay, naturally I urged her to write about her Marines experience, but she refused. I asked again. She continued to say no. “Play to your strength, Anu. You have a unique story.” She said no. “You’re squandering once-in-a-lifetime material.” She said no. This fruitless exchange went on deep into the semester, until it occurred to me that I should treat her the way her other recent superiors had treated her, and simply give her an order to write the essay. I became her CO. She came through with a stunning piece that was framed by her antiwar work after her tour of duty.